The Matisse Chapel


Hard to believe I've been in Vence for 10 days. It was more picturesque and charming than I could have imagined. 

Walking through the high schoolers' vape clouds outside Lycee Henri Matisse each morning on my way to the bus stop, I couldn't be optimistic about how many of these kids will be here two or three years from now. But Vence is a rich, resilient, desirable place to live. It'll be OK.

Just before leaving town for good, I crossed the gorge to visit Matisse's Chapel of the Rosary, a commission that he worked on from 1948 to 1951.




He was a brooding, unwell man at this time, making little paper cutouts of jellyfish shapes, his painting days long behind. After undergoing major surgery and fearing German bombings in Nice, he moved to Vence in 1943, where he was cared for by nurse Monique Bourgeois, who went on to pose for several portraits.

A year later she joined a convent. In 1945 she received a long letter from the artist saying that he had come to terms with the fact that his former model was now a nun.





Photo by Dimitri Kessel (1951). The Caped One died three years later.

Picasso needled him about his chapel work. 

"Why not a brothel?" he wrote.

Replied Matisse: "Because nobody asked me."


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